Through a Glass Darkly

Synopsis

Karin is a young wife, an older sister and an only daughter, whose kaleidoscopic interior world is a constantly changing picture where the boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary are becoming increasingly blurred. Haunting and sensual, Through a Glass Darkly is the iconic 1961 film by legendary Swedish director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman, which has been adapted for stage by Andrew Upton, co-artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 17 June 2010

If one thing is clear from Ingmar Bergman’s gloomy Oscar-winning 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, adapted for the stage by Jenny Worton, and directed by Michael Attenborough, it’s a warning about where to book your summer holidays. Chances of fun and relaxation are minimal in a remote cottage on a bleak island with just your immediate family for company.

Bergman, of course, liked Faro so much when he made the film there that he built a house and stayed forever. The house was on the site of the garden outpost where troubled young Max (Minus in the film) performs his strange, symbolic play with his sister Karin.

Surprisingly, this “performance” is replaced in the play with a mere reference to the script, a missed opportunity to theatricalise the incipient incest of Karin and Max. Otherwise, the sombre quadrille of guilt, madness and recrimination follows Bergman closely without the exceptional brilliance of the acting and the op...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 29 July 2010:

When attending a play adapted from a Bergman film you know you're not going to get a light domestic comedy. Sure enough this is an often harrowing look at a family beset by psychological problems; it's also far better than the somewhat similar Polar Bears, seen recently at the Donmar. Ruth Wilson is one of our more intense younger actresses, but here she is superb as Karin, beseiged by voices proclaiming a second coming but all too painfully aware and ultimately accepting of her plight. There is excellent support from Ian McElhinney and Dimitri Leonidas as her father and brother battling demons of their own and Justin Salinger as her husband watching helplessly from the sidelines. Through a Glass Darkly is not a play to be enjoyed exactly, but it offers rewards in other ways....

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